Path of Exile's free Betrayal expansion lets you play detective today

Path of Exile: Betrayal, the ARPG’s latest expansion, is out today. It’s a massive free update that reworks old leagues into the main game, introduces a new roster of masters and new missions, unifies hideouts, adds new skills and fattens up your dungeon delves with new maps. 

The big attraction is the Immortal Syndicate. This naughty group of scum and villains is doing necromancy crimes—oh no!—which they really shouldn’t be allowed to do. To stop them, you’ll need to hunt down members from the organisation’s four divisions and ruin their plans. What you do after you defeat them is where the new system becomes really interesting. 

See, you don’t need to kill them. Instead, you can interrogate and bargain with them, learning more about the structure of the organisation and who you need to take out next. You can even sweet talk them into betraying their pals. It’s like the Nemesis system from Shadow of Mordor/War, essentially, and it’s about time we saw more developers taking a page out of Monolith’s book. 

Eventually, once you’ve worked your way through the network, you’ll find the identity of the Syndicate's mastermind, but you’ll need to raid safehouses and take on high-ranked members before then. The good news is all those safehouses contain lots of lovely loot—the real reason you're saving the world. 

Check out the update page for more details.